Responsibility - christiansquoting.org.uk

Freedom is a package deal - with it comes responsibilities and consequences.

We are responsible for the effort, not the outcome.

We set the sail; God makes the wind.

It's my business to do God's business and it's His business to take care of my business.

None of us are responsible for all the things that happen to us, but we are responsible for the way we act when they do happen.

Why people get married: Because sooner or later, something is bound to happen which they can't blame on the government.

God says, 'Choose what you will and pay for it, '- Spanish proverb "

We cannot make events. Our business is wisely to improve them.-Samuel Adams (1722-1803) In "The Speaker's Electronic Reference Collection," AApex Software, 1994.

To keep your feet on the ground, carry some responsibility on your shoulders.Failure to hit the bull's-eye is never the fault of the target. -Gilbert Arland

I've often said, the only thing standing between me and greatness is me. - Woody Allen New Yorker 1996

Chiefly the mould of a man's fortune is in his own hands.- Francis Bacon. 1561-1626. Of Fortune.

When things go wrong it's rather tame
To find we are ourselves to blame,
It gets the trouble over quicker
To go and blame things on the Vicar.
The Vicar, after all, is paid
To keep us bright and undismayed
John Betjeman: "Blame the Vicar" -from "Church Poems", published by John Murray

Responsibility. A detachable burden easily shifted to shoulders of God, Fate, Fortune, Luck or one's neighbor. In the days of astrology it was customary to unload it upon a star. -Ambrose Bierce

The great thought, the great concern, the great anxiety of men is to restrict, as much as possible, the limits of their own responsibility.- Giosué Borsi

Remember this, that as Noah was drunk with his own wine, and as Goliath was beheaded with his own sword, and as the rose is destroyed by the canker which it breeds in itself, and as Agrippina was killed by Nero, to whom she gave breath, so if ever you are eternally destroyed, you will be destroyed by yourselves; if ever you are scourged to death, it will be by cords of your own making; and if ever the bitter cup of damnation be put into your hands, it will be found to be of your own preparing, mingling, and embittering!- Thomas Boston

The thing that will stop you from fulfilling your dreams is you. - Tom Bradley (1917-____) "The Impossible Dream," 1986.

Destiny is not a matter of chance, it is a matter of choice; itis not a thing to be waited for, it is a thing to be achieved.- William Jennings Bryan

Blame is for God and small children. Ralph Bunche (1904-1971) In "Papillon."

I did it to myself. It wasn't society...it wasn't a pusher, it wasn't being blind or being black or being poor. It was all my doing. -Ray Charles, on his heroin addiction

Chains provide warmth against the cold blast of freedom. - chollanamdo@mindspring.com in alt.quotations 2000

The price of greatness is responsibility - Churchill

The enemy is within the gates; it is with our own luxury, our own folly, our own criminality that we have to contend. - Cicero.

You can delegate authority, but not responsibility.- Stephen W. Comiskey

We create the world in which we live; if that world becomes unfit for human life; it is because we tire of our responsibility. -Cyril Connolly, Enemies of Promise (1938)

I only set the stage. You pull your own strings.-John Milton aka Satan, in Devil's Advocate 1997

Quote from the Boss... "I didn't say it was your fault. I said I was going to blame it on you."- Robert J Elkins

Cripple him, and you have a Sir Walter Scott. Lock him in a prison cell, and you have a John Bunyan. Bury him in the snows of Valley Forge, and you have a George Washington. Raise him in abject poverty and you have an Abraham Lincoln. Strike him down with infantile paralysis, and he becomes Franklin Roosevelt. Burn him so severely that the doctors say he'll never walk again, and you have a Glenn Cunningham -- who set the world's one mile record in 1934. Deafen him and you have a Ludwig van Beethoven. Have him or her born black in a society filled with racial discrimination, and you have a Booker T. Washington, a Marian Anderson, a George Washington Carver. Call him a slow learner, "retarded," and write him off as uneducable, and you have an Albert Einstein. As one man summed it up: Life is about 20% in what happens to us and 80% in the way we respond to the events.- Ted Engstrom

A man who enjoys responsibility usually gets it. A man who merely likes exercising authority usually loses it.-Malcolm S. Forbes

We improve ourselves by victories over ourself. There must be contests, and we must win.- Edward Gibbon (1737-1794)

We must have a citizenship less concerned about what the government can do for it and more anxious about what it can do for the nation.- Warren Harding (1865-1923) Republican National Convention, 7 Jun 1916.

There are inalienable obligations as well as inalienable rights.-Abraham Joshua Herschel

Those who cannot think or take responsibility for themselves need, and clamor for, a leader.-Hermann Hesse (1877-1962)_Reflections_ [1974], #106

I thought I was doing the right thing, I was obeying orders, and now, of course, I see that it was unnecessary and wrong. But I don't know what you mean by being upset about these things because I didn't personally murder anybody. I was just the director of the extermination program in Auschwitz. -Rudolf Hess (1894-1987), Commandant of Auschwitz, April 11, 1946 interview with Dr. Leon Goldensohn, from "Nuremberg Interviews," Goldensohn, ed. Robert Gellately, responding to question from Goldensohn about whether Hoess' role in the extermination of 2.5 million at Auschwitz was upsetting to him

God givers every bird its food, but he does not throw it intothe nest.- J. G. Holland

Responsibilities gravitate to the person who can shoulder them.- Elbert Hubbard

Personal responsibility is a difficult thing to ask for in a nation which has attempted to find a societal "root cause" for all things. - Shapley R. Hunter, 1992

Duty is ours; consequences are God's.- GENERAL STONEWALL JACKSON

No man was ever endowed with a right without being at the same time saddled with a responsibility. -Gerald W. Johnson

Keep always in your mind, that, with due submission to Providence, a man of genius has been seldom ruined but by himself. - Samuel Johnson: Letter to Joseph Baretti

He that embarks on the voyage of life will always wish to advance rather by the impulse of the wind than the strokes of the oar; and many foulder in their passage; while they lie waiting for the gale. -Johnson

We must exchange the philosophy of excuse -- what I am is beyond my control for the philosophy of responsibility.- Barbara Jordan (1936-1966) Speech at Bar Association, 1967.

[I]t is...the individual's task to differentiate himself from all the others & stand on his own feet. All collective identities...interfere with the fulfillment of this task. Such collective identities are crutches for the lame, shields for the timid, beds for the lazy.-C. G. Jung, "Late Thoughts," in _Memories, Dreams, Reflections_

The measure of our future success and happiness will not be the quality of the cards we are dealt by unseen hands, but the poise and wisdom with which we play them.`` Choose to play each hand to the best of your ability without wasting the time or energy it takes to complain about either the cards or the dealer or the often unfair rules of the game.`` Play both the winning and the losing hands as best you can, then fold the cards and ante up for the next deal! . - Joe Klock, Like Klockwork: The Whimsy, Wit, and (sometime)Wisdom of a Key Largo Curmudgeon by Joe Klock

I believe that we are solely responsible for our choices, and we have to accept the consequences of every deed, word, and thought throughout our lifetime. - Elisabeth Kubler-Ross (1926-____) In "The Speaker's Electronic Reference Collection," AApex Software,1994.

The reason people blame things on previous generations is that there's only one other choice.- Doug Larson

he game of life is not so much in holding a good hand as playing a poor hand well. -H. T. Leslie

A man may fall many times but he won't be a failure until he says someone pushed him. - Elmer G. Letterman

Responsibility by definition means answerable or accountable for. And what is a person responsible for? Everything he thinks, says or does. Why? Because no matter what or whom one can blame for the circumstances of his life, he is still stuck with the consequences of everything he thinks, says or does. People can be terribly unreliable but never irresponsible. Thus there is no way a person can be irresponsible because everyone is answerable or accountable for everything he thinks, say or does, does not do or neglects to do. Until people fully realise that they are totally responsible for their lives, we as a society collectively will be operating under a false and distorted assumption of what responsibility means.-Sidney Madwed

We have the Bill of Rights. What we need is a Bill of Responsibilities. Bill Maher, 1995

Everything that used to be a sin is now a disease.- Bill Maher, 1995

We are responsible for actions performed in response to circumstances for which we are not responsible.-Allan Massie, A Question of Loyalties

The feeling of a direct responsibility of the individual to God is almost wholly a creation of Protestantism.--- John Stuart Mill

Nothing of all these evils hath befallen me
But justly; I myself have brought them on;
Sole author I, sole cause.
John Milton. (1608&endash;1674). Samson Agonistes

A right without an attendant responsibility is as unreal as a sheet of paper which has only one side. Felix Morley

I've learned that our background and circumstances may have influenced who we are, but we are responsible for who we become.- James Rhinehart

I believe that every right implies a responsibility; every opportunity, an obligation; every possession, a duty. - John D. Rockefeller Jr.

One of the annoying things about believing in free will and individual responsibility is the difficulty in finding someone to blame your troubles on. And when you do find someone, it's remarkable how often their picture turns up on your driver's license.- P. J. O'Rourke

There's only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences.- P.J. O'Rourke

Men at some time are masters of their fates:
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings.
William Shakespeare. Julius Cæsar. Act i. Sc

Man is condemned to be free. Condemned, because he did not create himself, yet is nevertheless at liberty, and from the moment he is thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does. - Jean Paul Sartre

The great appeal of fatalism is as a refuge from the terror of responsibility. -Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.

Victimization status is the modern promised land of absolution from personal responsibility.- Laura Schlesinger

Man must cease attributing his problems to his environment, and learn again to exercise his will - his personal responsibility in the realm of faith and morals. -- Albert Schweitzer

I've always known I was gifted, which is not the easiest thing in the world for a person to know, because you're not responsible for your gift, only for what you do with it -Hazel Scott (1920-1981) Interview, Dec 1972; in "Notes and Tones," by Arthur Taylor, 1977.

You can't keep blaming yourself, Marge. Just blame yourself once and move on. -Homer Simpson

Everybody, soon or late, sits down to a banquet of consequences. -Robert Louis Stevenson

Many modern psychotherapists have adopted as their credo, Socrates' declaration that "the unexamined life is not worth living." But for modern man that is not enough. We should pledge ourselves to the proposition that the irresponsible life is not worth living. -Thomas S. Szasz _Law, Liberty and Psychiatry_ [1965]

Any set of social and economic arrangements which is not founded on the acceptance of individual responsibility will do nothing but harm. We are all responsible for our own actions. We cannot blame society if we disobey the law. We simply cannot delegate the exercise of mercy and generosity to others.-Margaret Thatcher, speech to the Church of Scotland General Assembly, 21.5.88

We want a society where people are free to make choices, to make mistakes, to be generous and compassionate. This is what we mean by a moral society; not a society where the state is responsible for everything, and no one is responsible for the state. - Margaret Thatcher

I think we've been through a period where too many people have been given to understand that if they have a problem, it's the government's job to cope with it. "I have a problem, I'll get a grant." "I'm homeless, the government must house me." They're casting their problem on society. And, you know, there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first. It's our duty to look after ourselves and then, also to look after our neighbour. People have got the entitlements too much in mind, without the obligations. There's no such thing as entitlement, unless someone has first met an obligation. - Margaret Thatcher"Aids, Education and the Year 2000," Woman's Own, 3 October 1987,Page 10

There is a living tapestry of men and women, and the beauty of that tapestry and the quality of our lives will depend on how much each of us is prepared to take responsibility for ourselves. And each of us, by our own efforts, is prepared to turn round and help those less fortunate. - Margaret Thatcher"Aids, Education and the Year 2000," Woman's Own, 3 October 1987,Page 10

As human beings, we are endowed with freedom of choice, and we cannot shuffle off our responsibility upon the shoulders of God or nature. We must shoulder it ourselves. It is up to us.- A. J. Toynbee

Don't go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.- Mark Twain

Don't go around saying God owes you something. God owes you nothing. He is here first.- GW, adapted from Mark Twain

Few things help an individual more than to place responsibility upon him and to let him know that you trust him.-Booker T. Washington

This being the Age of Therapism, my local school, which has a leaking roof, has a resident team of forty counselors. Talk and listen, talk and listen. All will be cured. Therapism absolves us of personal blame, assures us that there is no such thing as a moral problem, only one of confusion, for which the cure is counseling. Look at it our way, beg the therapists, the universe is essentially good! The fat aren't greedy, or genetically doomed: no, their unaesthetic shape is caused by abusive fathers. As in Erewhon, our criminals are mentally ill, poor things, and the ill (as in AIDS) are the criminals: they didn't eat right. All things are mendable; the pedophile and the rapist can be cured by talk and investigation of the past; the police, unlikely to catch the robber, can put the robbed in touch with their Victims' Support Group. All shall be well, and all shall be well. Once Christianity was the opiate of the people; now its sleeping draught is Therapism. -Fay Weldon, 1998

As a reporter, I interviewed, traveled with, reported on, and deplored Richard Nixon's actions for much of his career. As a columnist, I frequently criticized his presidency. Later, after his political career was ended, I studied Nixon and his record, talked to his friends and enemies, reviewed my own words and memories, and concluded that he was neither evil nor a victim, except of himself--and we're all that kind of victim. - Tom Wicker _Character Above All_

Misfortunes one can endure: they come from outside, they are accidents. But to suffer for one's own faults--ah! there is the sting of life.- Oscar Wilde, _Lady Windermere's Fan_

Often nowadays we hear a question posed that is not really a question. It is an oblique assertion of what the ostensible questioner considers a self-evident truth. The question is: Should we not all respect and honor one's differences? The gravamen of the "question" invariably is that differences of race, ethnicity and sexuality all should be "respected" and "honored."
I disagree. Why should respect and honor accrue to accidents of birth? Given that they are accidents, what, precisely, is there to honor? Surely, respect is owed to, and honor should flow to _individuals_, for their attainments of intellectual or moral excellence, not merely because of any membership in any group. - George Will